We will call to order the budget and audit committee meeting for Tuesday, April 22,

and before we go any further we better call the roll.

Thank you.

Councilmember Telemontes, councilmember Mapa will be absent today.

Councilmember Gada and chair Dickinson.

Here.

Have a quorum.

Thank you.

And councilmember Gada would you lead us in the land acknowledgement and the Pledge of

Allegiance.

Please join us.

Please rise for the opening acknowledgements and honor Sacramento's indigenous peoples

and tribal land.

To the original people of this land, the Nisanan people, the southern Maidu, the valley and

plains of Miwok, the Putwin-Winton people and the people of the Wilton Rancheria, Sacramento's

only federally recognized tribe, and we acknowledge and honor the native people who came before

us and still walk beside us today on these ancestral lands.

By choosing together today in the act of practice of acknowledgment and appreciation

for Sacramento's indigenous peoples history, contributions and lives.

Join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Salute.

Pledge.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for

which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you.

I just want to remind anyone who's interested in addressing the committee this morning on

any item on our agenda, please be sure to fill out a speaker form and bring that forward

to the clerk before we get to the item that you're interested in.

So we make sure that we include you in any comments you'd like to make.

And remember, each member of the public has allotted two minutes on an item.

You can see the clock tick down, so if you keep your eye on that, that sometimes is helpful

in figuring out just how much more time you've got to say whatever it is that you want us

to hear.

We appreciate that as well.

I just wanted to make note that we're lucky in Sacramento in the next couple of days to

have the Arts and Culture Summit for the state of California here.

Vice Mayor Telemontes and I were fortunate enough to make some opening remarks this morning.

But the Arts and Culture, the creative economy is a very important part of what we do here

in Sacramento throughout our region.

And it's great to see those coming from around the state to think about how we can expand

that creative economy, how we can expand the place and role of arts in our lives, especially

in these times.

So, hope they all have a good time and we encourage them to leave all their money right

here in the city of Sacramento.

So with that, I think we can go on to the consent calendar.

And Chair, I have no speakers on the consent calendar.

We'll have a motion by Council Member Guerra in a second.

Seconded by Vice Mayor Telemontes on the consent item.

If there's no discussion, all in favor signify by saying aye.

Opposed say no.

Any abstentions?

And that motion carries.

Okay.

On to item three.

Good morning, Chair, Council Members and Members of the Public.

I'm Pete Colleto, the City's Finance Director.

We have a very, very brief budget update for the committee.

And first, we just want to go over the upcoming key dates.

So all, as all of you know, we'll be releasing the proposed budget on April 30th.

The proposed budget will be balanced.

And then up in front of you is the schedule for our public meetings.

So we'll begin our budget hearings on May 13th at Council before going to the Measure

U Commission.

Council will have deliberations.

We have a special B&A meeting scheduled for June 3rd to consider any changes that Council

has proposed with budget adoption still slated for June 10th.

And I know we've been talking a lot about the budget context.

There are a couple of things that we just wanted to highlight that have come up since

we've last met.

And the first is really just this atmosphere of economic uncertainty.

So on April 2nd, the President announced a reciprocal tariff policy.

That's really just a global trade war right now.

And it's created a lot of economic uncertainty.

So you've all seen the stock market has fallen.

But what's been very strange about this and very atypical from prior recessions over the

past 40 years is we've seen the dollar drop and bond yields stay high.

So typically what happens when we have economic uncertainty is people flee to safety, right?

And they buy U.S. treasuries, they buy the dollar.

And that actually kind of helps us recover because it lowers interest rates in the economy.

We're not seeing that yet.

And that is giving cause for concern.

So you've probably been hearing more economists like Larry Summers, business leaders like

Jamie Dimon, just saying, hey, we think a recession is more likely.

So we haven't seen the impacts on it on our actual revenues.

We get our actuals, they're always kind of lagging, trailing indicators.

But we're going to continue to monitor this situation.

We'll update the council as we see any impacts.

One other thing that I just want to highlight, you know, because CalPERS highlighted it.

When the financial markets fall, that has an impact on our pension liabilities.

So you know, CalPERS, the first two days after the trade war was announced, CalPERS

said, hey, we lost about $15 billion, right, around 3% of their fund.

And they have a target just under 7% gains that they have to hit for us not to get unfund,

increase our unfunded liability.

So again, you know, it's a fluid situation.

It's very uncertain.

It's just something that we're keeping an eye on.

And we're going to, I can't predict the economy.

If I could, I'd be on a private yacht somewhere.

As we see things develop and as we might see budget impacts, we're certainly going to keep

you updated.

And then just the other thing to highlight, you know, we've been talking before about

our threats to federal funding.

You know, there is a lot of litigation ongoing around that.

The president kind of reiterated the other week about wanting to withdraw or pause funding

to jurisdictions like Sacramento.

It's something our city attorney's office is fighting and it's something that we're

keeping an eye on.

You know, we have not put, we have not in our budget, you know, forecasted a recession.

We also haven't forecasted a loss of federal funds.

But as we mentioned, you know, the proposed budget will include a federal funding reserve

to help us weather any withdrawals or pauses in funding.

So again, the next big day is April 30th.

You know, we are, we will be releasing the budget and we're happy to answer any questions.

But like I said, a very brief update.

Thanks Pete for that question.

In the vein that you were just talking about, Pete, I've had, and I'm sure others have as

well, I've had some communications in the last week or so from those who are in this

case especially worried about loss of funding for the arts.

From the standpoint that those, it's somewhat related to your, your purge comment that there

are obviously private individuals who are donors who have seen their portfolios shrink

rather considerably in the last couple of weeks.

And so the donors are unable or unwilling, hesitant at the very least to continue to,

to provide support to a number of the arts, key arts organizations in the community.

And I just wonder if obviously our capacity as a city is severely constrained.

But if that's something that you would just put on your list of things that has popped

up as an issue.

The other is that's been mentioned to me as the, is the withholding of money for preventive

health care.

Of course that issue was argued in the Supreme Court yesterday, I believe it was.

In particular with respect to preventive treatments that reduce the spread of HIV.

And that's obviously a concern in our, in our community as it is elsewhere around the

country.

So my sense is, and I've told people the county may be a better forum in which to pursue

that, although they're looking at obviously federal withholding too.

But if that's also something that we have on the list, I would appreciate it.

So do we have anyone who wishes to address us on this item?

I have two speakers.

The first is Lambert, then MacWervey.

You are correct.

It says review.

It says review.

Good morning.

This is, this is an interesting issue to me because I'm hearing people say, and this

guy right here is a very good, I don't know what his title is, but he's finance director.

I'm impressed with him because of his numbers and what he talks about.

I want to add to that because when it comes to graphs and surveys, they can be skewered

for a hidden agenda.

It's real simple to skew facts.

That's why I like what he's talking about so I can study what he said.

Now, as I listen to him, I hear trade wars.

Well, trade wars just started since Trump got in there.

What happened to the money before the trade wars?

There was a lot of money that went into the city coffers before these trade wars.

There was even a guy that came up here one time when I was here and arrogantly said,

the good old days of the COVID money.

What could be good about people being killed from a pandemic?

That's arrogant.

And it's also showing why you have a deficit.

I've never heard of a structural deficit in my life.

I've heard a deficit, but not structural.

To me, structural deficit means mismanagement.

And you can find out who mismanaged the money by a really good outside audit.

It's going to take an outside federal audit to find out where all that money went because

that needs to be studied.

When you start talking about before the trade wars, be careful because a lot of money came

into these coffers before that trade war.

Thank you for your comments.

Matt, were these our next speaker?

Good morning, group.

We look at the budget development up to date.

We saw a couple of things here.

We saw a committee, a sex trafficking from his district come on as a committee.

Were that added in?

We saw the face of three new attorneys.

Were that added into this update of the budget?

Somebody's trying to come up for who put the money on voting for them.

That's what that is about.

If that not in the budget, what was the update?

Think about what you're saying because the things you're saying, you talk about number

two, an audit, and then you come here and talk about developing a budget.

You don't have really a hearing here.

This is the information.

A hearing is a two-sided figure.

You can ask questions to the people that come here and they can ask questions on the opposition.

On the oath.

That's what we need in this city to really put this city on its feet to go forward.

We got to quit the line.

We got to step up to the plate and be real on what's going on with the money.

That's some real sad things that are going on here with the money.

So wake up and listen to what people are saying.

Not only me, it's what people are saying out here in the public.

Thank you for your comments.

Chair, I have no more speakers.

Okay.

Thank you.

This is an information item.

If there aren't further comments or questions from committee members, the schedule is the

important thing to keep in mind with the release of the proposed budget on April 30th.

I think we can just underscore what Pete was saying and then the council's consideration

of it beginning on May 13th.

But Chair, I do have a question.

The recommendation was to pass a motion to open the budget hearings on May 13th, 2025.

Is that necessary?

I don't quite understand that motion.

It was just to move it to the 13th.

Shall we pass the motion to do that such?

Oh, I see what it is.

Yes, it will.

Okay.

We can do it on the 13th, I suppose.

I'll move the motion to open budget hearings on May 13th.

Thank you for catching that.

Thank you.

We have a motion and a second to open on the budget hearings on May 13th, 2025.

Any comments or questions?

If not, all in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Opposed say no.

Abstentions?

And that motion carries.

That's a new one for me.

Okay, next item.

For me too.

Okay.

Item four is the consideration of the Measure of the Community Advisory Commission recommendations

regarding the establishment of the program goals and progress reporting.

And Teddy, are you going to open this?

I will.

Okay.

We have a slide as well.

Welcome.

Thank you for having me.

Perfect.

Okay.

Yeah, I'm really excited to be here.

Again, thanks for having me.

Measure U has been sort of advocating for this for a long time, but I think we as a group

have struggled to sort of get a solid plan together on what it is exactly we want to

see and getting buy-in from staff and city council.

And so after, I think the reason I'm so excited today is because I feel like we have that

now.

We've been able to meet with city council members.

We have been able to meet with staff, including Amy Williams, P Coletto, Ash, who are sort

of like spearheading the new data initiatives in the city to sort of refactor the department

level metrics that we capture and goals.

And so, yeah, I think today is a day where I think we can move to like get some real

progress on this.

And so I've come here with some recommendations and let's go through them.

So every quarter, there is a financial quarterly report that measure you, that is procured

for measure U goals.

We have about 93, sorry, for measure U programs.

We have about 93 programs that measure U funds.

A lot of these are support-based programs.

So for example, providing IT or providing transportation, things like this, which don't

necessarily require a goal on their own.

But there are many that would be very nice to have.

And so my recommendation here, and I'll get into it in more detail later in this presentation,

but each program funded by measure U should have a trackable goal.

And these goals should be added to the measure U quarterly financial report.

The second recommendation here is if the goal we established for a program requires new

data to be captured, we will not require reporting at this time.

And this is a goal, this is a recommendation to reduce the amount of staff tax, I guess

you could say, that it would impose on the city.

So measure U and staff will compile that list that we don't already have captured, come

back to budget and I'll audit at a later time to be reviewed and sort of determine what new

data is worth capturing at that time.

And I'll get into more, I guess, staff saving time, or staff time savings later in this

presentation as well.

So here's an example of why we view it as an important, I think you guys will see, and

this is small text, but I think it will make sense as we go through it.

Essentially I have taken a line item here, and if we look at this, there's a, in our

current quarterly fiscal report, we get this program, there's a few other lines including

like full FTE account, how much is funded, but I've left those out because those are

going to stay the same.

We have a purpose to program and we have the status of program.

And here in the status of program you can see the Sacramento Police Department continues

to actively recruit and hire diverse applicants to pipeline positions.

There will always be vacancies as many of these hires promote into other classifications

within the department and or city.

Obviously, very noble goal, we largely agree as a city, we need more police officers because

over time is currently very expensive for us.

But what I'd like to move this to is something a little bit more quantitative rather than

qualitative because it will be more practical and useful in evaluating the programs themselves.

So for example, instead of this status of program, we have program goal which is recruit

32 new sworn officers by year end through this program or reduce over time pay by 5%

year over year.

And then we would have the current goal status in that quarterly, in the quarterly report

so it says, for example, 15 hires have been made year to date and maybe a hundred, a thousand

six hundred fifty three hours of reduction of overtime pay or something along these lines.

Now these goals are obviously very straw manned when we went through this as a council or

as a commission, sorry, and we propose these goals.

We expect these to be iterated on.

This is not something that needs to be set in stone.

And we would work with staff to sort of refine these as we got, as we sort of meant more

frequently.

And obviously I'm not trying to poo poo on any department here.

In fact, I've talked with Chief Lester about this.

I think the police department has one of the most successful programs in terms of metrics

and goals to capture.

It's just a matter of getting those into the quarterly fiscal report.

So here's another example.

But I don't think we need to necessarily go through it.

I just want to point out that moving from a quantitative or sorry, a qualitative to

a quantitative sort of description will be very useful in terms of both the city council

evaluating these programs, us and staff evaluating these programs.

Another thing I want to bring up actually is just yesterday we had some focus group

reporting to because we had a measure you meeting last night.

Those groups were finally concluded and we basically did a basically run through the

Stanford settlement where we went to the members of the public and said, what do you

know about measure you?

What do you like to see about measure you?

And one of the things they absolutely said is they love one Ashes dashboard that he

put together that sort of displays all the programs and the which is what you're seeing

here actually it has this in it.

But what they really wanted to see was more quantitative data, which is fantastic because

it sort of backs what we've also been saying for a long time.

So of course, the thing that everyone would be concerned about here is city staff time

and we want to minimize that as much as possible.

We realize that there are many things to accomplish and there's many fires to put out.

This is not likely one of those fires.

And so how do we make it so a staff has the least amount of tax on them as possible?

The first thing we've done is we straw man the proposal to give a strong starting point.

So we've gone through all 93 programs.

We've given straw man goals that we think would fit and that would give a starting point for

staff so they don't have to start from scratch.

They can almost be just like, yep, that one works for us or this one doesn't work for

us.

And then we can reiterate from there.

Obviously, there would be a strong collaboration with measure you as has been seen over the

past few quarters.

Again me and other members of the commission meeting with staff.

And I think we could wait till after budget finalization because obviously right now is

a bit crunchy in terms of time.

And the last thing which I think is the most important is using metrics we already capture.

So a lot of the worry here was that we would have to start training on new metrics to capture.

We would have to start new data capture pipelines.

And I'm saying we don't need to do that yet.

Let's start with something simple.

This is sort of the agreement that when I was meeting with Pied or with Amy or with

Ash, this was something that we felt is a good compromise is well, we already have these

metrics that we capture, quite a few of them.

Let's just use those for now and see what we can fill in into the program sheet in the

quarterly financial report.

And then any field that we don't have yet captured, let's say we have a goal that we

don't have data associated with or we're just not capturing that goal yet, we'll just put

in that field not yet captured.

Until later time, again, like I said, we'll come back to budget and audit with all those

goals that we don't yet capture and we'll talk about whether we think there's a good

return on investment for those.

And likely that would come for whether or not we've seen a good return on investment

from doing the first part of it, which is the stuff that we already capture.

So I have some desired outcomes here, of course.

Goals and metrics create the structure for how we approach problems and facilitate discussions

for improvement.

I think every program makes sense to everyone.

I think if you asked any person on the street, should we have a goal for the things that

we're funding?

Of course, if we should have a goal, right?

And those goals should likely be measurable in some sort of way so that you can say at

the end of the year, did we meet those goals?

In a city that currently has structural deficit, we're obviously not alone in this.

There's many cities, counties, et cetera, that have this issue.

But ROI is becoming more and more important.

And so to taking a little bit more fine tooth comb to the programs seems like a good idea,

and this is one way to accomplish that.

Gathering metrics can cost time and resources.

So of course, we want to be cognizant of that and make sure that the processes that we're

putting in place are not overburdening.

And that's why I've tried to make it as minimizing in terms of staff time as possible.

And this small change will allow city council staff and measure you to conduct this analysis

in a more effective way.

So that would be another desired outcome.

So that way we can give back the best reports to you in our annual suggestions.

So action items for this, which we would be following up on over the next few months,

would be staff would procure a list of existing data that is collected for measure you programs.

We already have a good amount of this already.

We've been having presentations from each department, and they have been including metrics

and data and goals in those slides.

So I think actually measure you may even be able to take this step.

It wouldn't even necessarily have to be staff to sort of take a first pass on seeing which

line items we have already data for and which goals we already have data for and sort of

mark those off.

And then just the remaining subset would be able to we pass it to staff and be like,

hey, are we collecting on these ones yet?

And if not, that's fine.

Just market no.

And if yes, great, let's mark that yes and move forward.

Later after that has been resolved, we would have a meeting with staff like I've been having

already.

But sort of to review the straw man goals, do these make sense to you?

Are these good goals?

Do you think they fit the program?

We think they might, but I'd love to hear your feedback.

I sort of just have like a quick, like maybe one hour session where we just go through

the programs and sort of agree.

And then lastly, of course, which is the most, or I should say third is most important is

updating this quarterly financial report process just to move from the status of programs to

the goals and goal status columns instead.

And again, marking not collected for any goals not yet measured.

So this is again sort of like an ease into it sort of method.

And then come back to budget and audit later with a list of goals, which would require

additional data capture for sign off.

And so to again, to reduce staff time.

That's it.

That's the proposal.

Thank you so much.

And happy to answer any questions.

Thanks for the presentation.

We have comments or questions from council members at this point.

Okay.

Let's we'll come back to you, Kenny.

We've I think we've got some folks who would like to comment and then public comment and

then we'll come back.

Thank you, Chair.

I have three speakers.

Lambert, Mcworthy, then Marbella Sela.

Measure you.

Measure you.

This meeting was last night and I was there.

And I saw some things.

I think that the chairman of budget audit and all of the city council people and even

the lawyer who none of you were there last night, but you should go back and study what

happened last night in this chamber because I commented on it and I was one of the last

people left in this building.

And I saw some things that confirm why this city is in the structural deficit.

All you have to do is study the measure you committee meeting last night.

I was there.

Measure you.

And I went to a lot of meetings.

I was invited to a lot of meetings by Mayor Steinberg.

Shout out to him because can you imagine if you didn't have measure you the city of Sacramento,

which I was born and raised here.

My parents moved here in 1946.

So I really do care about Sacramento.

I mean that.

There are people in this city for whatever reason, whether it's their election of duty,

whether it's arrogance where they are literally ruining Sacramento financially.

When you can make a suggestion that a city is going to be in deficit five years out,

there should be some cost cutting to that type of mind.

Mr. Dickerson said we should grow out of it.

That's true.

You have to make cuts and you should not give people working remotely a raise.

What's the raise for?

They don't have to leave home.

The only one who should get a raise and she's here with a thing on her neck today is Minty

Cuppey.

She should be the highest paid at City Hall and be working remotely.

Thank you for your comments.

Backwardy then Marbella Sala.

Mr. Dickerson, you should go back to the language when it was put together.

And you will find some of the same thing when the arena was put together.

Some money went to the opposite direction.

That's the reason the city spent $900,000 with the outside attorneys to depend what

went on about the arena.

So when you created this measure, it was for children.

Nobody said we're going to put a dollar here.

Now we see the Polish department going for money.

Goals are nice words, but we talk about economics here.

And the use of taxpayers' dollar to create jobs, not to create somebody's pocket bigger.

And that's what you have done in the city.

I've been here since the 2000s, almost every meeting.

You get the same old shit over and over of bonds and bonds.

You can't survive all bonds and grants people.

You've got to have something to produce and money.

We want to audit from the federal government on measure you money and homeless money.

That's what we're begging for.

We want the government to do that outside audit.

Buy a common farm on the outside and show who and people here took money, you must go

to jail.

Many dollars have been taken here by people, you must go to jail.

Just like you.

You've got to get up here and talk about what you want to own in there.

What you see here is you'll go, you don't have the ability to think about what Trump

doing because you have messed the city up so bad.

And then you want people to come here and visit.

You want to come to a city that's fighting behind the county.

People wake up.

Our final speaker is Marbella Sela.

Good morning.

I'm Marbella and I'm here as measure you representative for district three.

And I'm here to support the request for data and determining outcomes on how measure you

is being spent.

I attended and thank you all who voted to support giving measure you resources to conduct

focus groups.

It was way overdue and I attended all the focus groups and without a doubt everyone really

appreciated the transparency of the dashboard because that was the first time they were

really seeing how is measure you monies are half a cent that we voted for.

How is it being spent?

And they appreciated being able to look at it and understand it.

However, they want more of that.

They really want more of that.

But what they all said is how do we know what the impact was of the monies that we spent

that measure you is being spent our tax, our taxes are being spent.

What's the impact that's having in the communities that it's supposed to benefit?

Are those communities being uplifted by the measure you resources that are going in those

communities and they even went further to say by neighborhoods.

And I know the neighborhoods one is a very difficult one and it's not data that readily

available.

They really want to see it and they want to see it in conjunction with where the money

is going but then what's the impact.

And that's something as I've been I think three years now, four years on measure you

and that's something we've been asking for.

We want to see it because when we're trying to make our recommendations on for the next

year how to fund a program or do we continue funding that program or should we give that

program more research because they've done a good they've met their goals and they need

more to continue doing what needs to be done.

Thank you for your comments.

Chair, I have no more speakers on this item.

Thanks for the comments to all.

We'll bring it back to the council members if there are comments or questions.

Council Member Guerra.

Thank you very much chair.

Just briefly I would say that you know thank you to all the commissioners and thank you

to Commissioner Johnston also from District 6 as well who is representing our community

there and very active and on the youth piece as well.

What I do think it is it would be helpful for us to move from a qualitative to a quantitative

approach.

The only thing that I would caution is particularly someone who you know with an engineering background

and sometimes particularly when we're providing services to the public they aren't as discreet.

If we were say the you know the Department of Utilities where we see the number of flow

that we have and response time to approve for maintenance those things I think are concrete.

But I just the only thing that I would say and maybe this is something that the Measure

Youth Commission can help out is for example I'll just use the youth program with the police

department.

Well yes I think this is a good example of how we want to show the recruitment efforts

to grow our own department for both the not only the police cadet program but the fire

academy also program.

But the benefit of that is also that we're exposing more families to the profession and

more and engaging in a community more than we would before.

So how do you so what I would ask the commission is there are certain qualitative pieces that

I would like them to explore and say if we do go through a service level program then

how do you how do you account for some of the qualitative aspects that we have.

So it it's different for every department and then the last piece I would say is you

know to change this may take time but just like we're doing with the on how we budget

and the impacts to communities it will we may want to look at some departments first

and then build up on that so that over time we've created a much more thoughtful qualitative

approach.

So and I don't know if you know our commissioner wants to briefly comment on that but I would

say that yes we should move in that form.

I think it's a good data point but it doesn't go it isn't always as discreet for every single

department.

Yeah totally I just real quick on that I think we as a commission agree with you 100 percent

the data is there to inform the goals are there to inform not decide right.

And so yeah it's just something to help us assist in the subjective decisions that we

make it on the day to day.

Thank you appreciate the comments Vice Mayor Telemantez.

I think my comments are along count Mayor Pro Tem Guerra's thought process.

It's like some departments at work so other ones that may not it's also like quality over

quantity are you going to spend more time with someone and make sure that you meet someone's

needs and provide that good customer care service or are you solving the issue drop

in the phone line and then you know picking up the next call to meet quotas and numbers.

And so I think it's a balancing act.

In addition our staff is looking at the racial equity lens and that's currently work going

in progress and so how does that intertwine with the goals of the Measure You Commission.

And so just thanks to think about.

So thank you for all your work and the transparency and all the good ideas that the Measure You

Commission does because put in so many hours and really just appreciate you guys.

Thank you.

First of all I want to add my thanks to you as the chair and to all the commission members

for the work you've done.

I know this has been a long standing effort on the part of the commission and I know you

have a pretty good sense that you've all put in a lot of work on it.

So I think we ought to express our appreciation because you do all do it on a volunteer basis

as do other members of boards and commissions but I know this has been a long standing and

particularly intense level of focus for the commission over time.

I hold the view that what you're driving at while your scope is Measure You, I hold the

view that this effort embodies where we ought to be going as a city across the board in

terms of setting goals and objectives, having clear direction on those and then measuring

how we're doing.

It's often said if you can't measure it it's not worthy.

I think the point about qualitative measures is important as well as our quantitative.

So I think both are essential to making wise judgments about how we spend precious and

all too scarce public dollars for the needs that we have.

I'm curious to the extent and I don't know if it's Pete or someone else who is appropriate

to comment on this.

I am curious about your sense of the action items that Teddy presented.

My understanding as a baseline is that the commission isn't asking the staff to do anything

while the budget is still getting settled.

So this would be after June 10th but after July 1st probably for all practical purposes.

Is there a comment or reaction you have to the action items that the commission is asking

endorsed?

Yeah, sure, Chair.

So as Teddy mentioned we had a really positive first meeting.

I think the city staff is in alignment with the views that you expressed and measure you

expressed in that we want to make sure that we're performing and that we can show that

we're performing and measure that and help inform the council.

To the points that the Vice Mayor and Mayor Pro Tem met or said I think we need to also

look at more than just measuring widgets.

And so there are a lot of different performance management philosophies.

Back in my prior life in the county one of the things that we looked at is how much are

we doing, how well are we doing it and is anyone better off.

So looking at your performance measurement through that framework.

Specifically on next steps for measure you, we're going to continue to meet, try to get

into alignment.

As kind of looking at things just not at the measure you fund but all funds, I want to

make sure that there's alignment so that we're not doing one set of performance measurements

for measure you and a separate one for the general fund and a separate one for the community

center fund.

I want to make sure that those things are aligned and that they're in alignment with

council priorities.

So you know we committed to sharing with measure you, hey here are all the things we're measuring

already because we measure things just as departments to make sure that we're doing

our operational work and hey maybe some of those are really interesting for you as a

measure you commission and so we're going to share those and then we're going to continue

to meet and I did like the mayor protem's idea as well and I expressed that to Teddy

too, why don't we focus on an area, maybe not even just a single department but like

a program area as a first step and kind of proof of concept and see how we can align

performance measures across funds.

So we're not in opposition and I appreciate all the work that Teddy and the commission

have done to highlight this and at City staff we're always trying to kind of iterate and

improve our performance measurement.

And the last thing I'll always just say is because we're in a budget deficit situation

back when I was at the county and we were in a similar situation, you know what I would

tell some a lot of the program people is imagine you're on the board of supervisors, imagine

you're on the city council and you have two programs and one you know the staff is saying

hey this is a great program and the other the staff is saying hey this is a great program

and here are all the reasons I can prove it.

Which program do you think is going to keep its funding?

So it's in everyone's interest to be able to you know measure and make sure that we're

doing a good job.

Well I think thank you Pete I think that your last comment is striking because I also think

measuring outcomes is critical to the exercise because measuring process tells you something

but not really much in the end and trying to measure qualitatively how program is a

tricky undertaking and certainly varies from program to program.

But defining outcomes that we're looking for and then figuring out how do we measure

whether we're getting to those outcomes that to me is the most meaningful thing we can

do in the assessment or analysis evaluation effort.

So I hope that the work that you're both describing will include let's be looking at our outcomes

as what we're assessing and what we're measuring.

The other thing that you said that I think strikes a chord with me is what the commission

is doing seems to me it's critical has to be integrated with what the staff is doing.

It doesn't work to have multiple efforts or approaches to this.

So you know I would encourage both the commission and the staff to work very hard and I notice

that's mentioned in the memo about that integration and maybe it makes sense to try test drive

something in the program area but I would hope that with this amount of time having

gone by we get to something that's a broader assessment.

I won't say sooner rather than later but I'll say with all due deliberate speed because

this really once we can get there then that can be we can get to that point you were describing

of here's a great program and here's a great program that is a great program because and

I'm not sure we're in that position now but that's where we'd all like to be.

So I would just finally ask the motion that's recommended that you're talking about

and I think the best way to understand it is to review comment and direct staff to collaborate

with the measure you commission to incorporate where practical commission feedback on the

city's update on performance measures and reporting.

Is that motion enough to carry the meaning that we've been talking about in this dialogue this morning?

I think so.

I just want to make sure that you all don't end up back here or in some other forum saying

you know boy somehow we missed connection when we were talking to the council committee.

Okay so I see the interim city manager nodding her head that yes this is clear enough and direct enough

and acknowledging the same and Teddy that works for you?

Okay on behalf of the commission.

Okay all right I thank you all and if we don't have further comment or question a motion is in order.

This is just review comment and direct staff.

So if we did that.

We did it.

Perfect.

Oh I get to make the motion.

No motion.

It's no motion.

It's review comment.

No I want let's make it as a motion.

Okay I'll make that motion.

Second.

Second by Mr. Guerra.

All in favor signify by saying aye.

Opposed say no.

And any abstentions?

Hearing none the motion carries.

Thank you all.

Thank you for that discussion and we'll move on to item five which is the audit of the city's animal care services division.

You made it under the wire.

Good morning.

Good morning.

My name is Julian Metcalf and I'm joined by my colleague Eric Spivak and we are from GPP analytics and we're here to discuss the performance audit in the animal care services division.

Just to overview briefly the audit objectives from the city auditor were relatively broad covering the functions of the division.

Everything from animal care standards to policies and procedures and the operations of what is a relatively complex city service.

Our audit report includes 10 findings and 31 recommendations.

We believe there's some public interest in this and we went in depth in the audit report so that there's information available for background.

We also included two sections on functions that did not have findings but with additional background for interested parties.

And then of course we included an appendix as well based on an employee engagement survey we performed so the division had additional resources.

And I'll just briefly go through the 10 findings.

Our first finding delves into the background of the facility itself and its operations.

So as you may be aware the facility has been at capacity for some time.

There was a recent facility assessment that suggested it would roughly take about 60 million dollars to update the facility to meet its needs.

And so we looked at some of the root causes beyond that about the operations and the intake and you can see two charts here of the dog capacity over recent years in the cat capacity and the dotted line shows that capacity.

And of course there was a downtime when intake during COVID was limited but dogs have now in recent years exceeded the design capacity of the facility and cats on a seasonal basis due to something called kitten season when there are birth of kittens in the summer months.

So looking at this though going behind it we saw that stray animals tend to be a major cause of intakes and there's other reasons for intake of course legal and practical reasons that animals come to the shelter.

But the length of time the animals stay in the shelter adds additional stress to the animals especially dogs which exacerbates behavioral issues and challenges they may face which then has worse outcomes for the animals sometimes resulting in euthanasia for these behavioral issues.

And when we're looking at the holistic reasons of how to address this we came at with recommendations around some of the root causes.

This is not meant to be a panacea there are no easy solutions for this but addressing some of this strays with more spay and neuter services and of course opportunities since it seems unrealistic at this time to update the facility as the facility assessment suggested at that price tag.

Looking at partnerships with different community jurisdictions where there may be opportunities to work with them.

The second finding focuses in on the staffing shortages that the division has struggled with. As you can see in the chart here the vacancy rate has in recent years been relatively high in difficulty in retaining staff and having a gap between the budgeted amount.

And those that are filled it's our understanding that in recent months the division has had a lot of success filling some of its vacancies and that's quite a positive but looking at recent history this had us delve into the nature behind some of the chronic vacancies and the challenges in the work environment.

And we performed an employee engagement survey which looked at some of those root causes which again is detailed in length in the appendix of the report.

But the challenging work environment is not just unique to the city it's our understanding that this is a national problem when you look at what's happening in veterinary and animal care.

There's high rates of depression and suicide in those sectors and challenging work environments looking at Department of Labor statistics high rates of injury.

So the challenges they face based on the work environment in the morale it's not unique to the city. It's it appears to be a chronic national problem in this industry.

But there are things that can be done to improve it and we have recommendations around improving staffing retention.

Finding three focuses on an important gap where the division does not have finalized policies and procedures as may be self evident having policies and procedures is important for staff knowing what to do on a regular basis and holding them accountable.

One of the things we saw in the employment engagement survey was some staff report not knowing how they should act and what they should do and what their expectations are.

Finding four looks into the animal control and these are the officers who patrol and provide services in the community in particular.

And this overlaps with a lot of the other issues. They've had vacancies in this unit. In particular they had a lack of a chief for a long time and so understanding that position has been recently filled as well which bodes well for them and also an opportunity to solidify and make consistent policies and procedures for animal control.

Finding five looks at the reporting that the division does and the division does a great deal of reporting. They have dashboards on their own web page but then also on the city's open data portal.

We found some inconsistencies in the data, some gaps and some opportunities where they could monitor it better because the data, the erroneous data has the potential to be misleading and has the risk to public trust.

Finding six does relate back to that first finding where if there is an increase in spay and neuter services there is an opportunity to provide better medical services.

The shelter essentially has two functions in its medical services. There's shelter medicine which is the day to day treatment and surgery of animals for various needs and then there's the spay and neuter sterilization services which is really to provide spay and neuters to animals that are in the shelter and then if available could also service animals in the community.

There has been a six month wait time for animals to be spayed and neutered when they come into the shelter and luckily through the division's network and robust amount of volunteers and a foster system those animals who need to be spayed and neutered to be released before they're adopted have been held in a temporary foster state and they've been able to work around it pretty well.

But if spay and neuter were to be emphasized more they may need more space for this and since new facility is not necessarily feasible we have a recommendation in there for a temporary facility that could be on site.

It's our understanding too that the division is looking at different community sites that would work as well.

And then some just simple recommendations around reporting so that metrics could be tracked better.

Finding seven focuses in on the licensing compliance related to animals that are legally required per city code to be licensed.

The licensing rates for dogs are about 14% of the estimated dog population in the city and 7% of cats.

After speaking with folks throughout the industry cats tend to be lower in compliance across any jurisdiction but the dogs tend to be in Sacramento's case are a little bit lower than the norm among other jurisdictions.

This has major implications for rabies control and prevention but also for revenue.

What this does by not collecting these required fees that are legally required under current city code it shifts the burden on to the city's general fund.

And so there's an opportunity here just to increase compliance and awareness of these fees so that revenue can be improved so that the services aren't so reliant on general fund sources.

Finding eight speaks about the city's relationship and the division's relationship with the Friends of Front Street organization.

The Friends of Front Street organization provides a tremendous amount of support amongst all the volunteers that work for the shelter and work with the shelter.

This organization provides funding and as many of the volunteers belong to it.

We see some risk here in the informality of the relationship that to prevent potential risks formalizing this relationship could really make clear different roles in relationships and prevent problems that could occur.

Finding nine speaks to the Homelessness Assistant Program, the HOPE Program, which was funded by the, sorry, which was originally authorized by the city council to have six FTE.

Due to this division staffing challenges over the years there's been one FTE formally assigned to the program and this of course does not necessarily meet the city council's goals and the reporting on it has some opportunities to be improved.

It's our understanding that the division with its recent hires is able to fill this program more.

We haven't, that wasn't in our audit period so they may have made some improvements here.

But of course having some certainty about who is staff there would help meet the goals assigned by the city council.

And then finally finding ten speaks to the tremendous volunteers that support the shelter.

They put in countless hours, there are hundreds of volunteers and the division does have staff supported, dedicated to supporting the volunteers.

But we just see some opportunities for better metrics to track them because they are so important to the shelter's operations.

And those are the ten findings and if you have any questions we would be happy to answer them.

Again my colleague is here and we can speak to anything.

Thank you.

Okay let's take some questions and then we'll get to public comment.

Vice Mayor Telemantez.

Thank you, Chair.

I have a question for finding number two about it being like a national problem and I know we were having a hard time with recruitment of vets here in Sacramento.

Is it because there is no like college to career pipeline educational programs in our community colleges?

Is it like what are you guys seeing in terms of the national trend that's like impeding people from going into this kind of career?

Right.

Well there's a number of layers to it I'd really say.

On the veterinary side I think it is an expensive schooling, expensive education to get with comparative to human doctors just in a really broad sense.

The pay is much less yet you put in the same amount of time so I think there's some stress there.

High expectations on program delivery and then.

So yeah what the veterinarian is one of the bigger issues I believe is that they haven't really increased the number of positions available in veterinary schools for students.

The pet population has increased dramatically so it's a supply and demand problem.

As far as the other positions at the county, the research, the research we came across didn't really go into details as to what is causing the challenges.

Our, and this is really just our best guess, is when you look at options and wages, it's a very tough job and there's easier ways to make the same amount of money.

There's really kind of what it boils down to.

Okay, sounds good.

And then the cost savings and increasing spray neuter.

I guess these are kind of questions for Phillip so I don't know.

Questions for the auditor.

For the auditor for today.

And then we'll get to the staff.

Okay so that's it for the auditor.

Thank you.

Okay any other questions for the auditor at this point?

Okay hearing none.

We go ahead and take public comment and then we'll have questions for the staff.

Thank you.

And maybe for the auditor too.

Thank you chair.

I have three speakers.

The first is Dia Good and Leah Morris.

Then Jim Helped.

Dia.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for presenting this audit.

It's findings are important and its recommendations need to be implemented.

Sadly it paints a picture of mismanagement in several areas.

The shelter has responded by saying they are busy and short-staffed and therefore lack the time and resources to function appropriately.

Yes the shelter is struggle, does struggle, but much of it is the result of self-enforced errors.

I am very concerned about their ability to implement the much needed changes in a timely fashion.

I also don't see the logic in giving the task of solving these problems to the entity that created or ignored them in the first place over the past two years.

If Front Street was capable of doing it in the first place we wouldn't be discussing a different audit today.

Are you aware that the shelter doesn't even have the seasoned team to respond?

The shelter operations manager quit last month in the chief animal control officer position which has been vacant for two years.

Two years.

That person is now a new hire.

Years ago the city created a blue ribbon commission to address the extensive findings in the H in the humane society of the United States audit.

This group was able to prioritize and evaluate the recommendations and work with the shelter and the public to create a viable working plan to present to the city council.

I am asking that you consider tasking the animal well-being commission with this job.

They have the collective expertise and track record witness the shelter needs assessment to help get the shelter over the front line, over the finish line.

And they could do a lot of this work.

Thank you for your consideration.

Our next speaker is Leah Morris.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for the opportunity to talk.

I wanted to say that we are very thankful that this audit has been made available and we have had the chance to review it briefly and be here today.

In fact, we are looking at a presentation at our next commission meeting May 14th and have requested the opportunity to have either the city auditor or the consultant who did this audit come to our commission meeting and make a presentation.

We are also ourselves looking through this audit to try to understand if there are opportunities for our commission to be involved and support action, whether it is helping with policies and procedures or looking at ways to increase bay and neuter in order to decrease euthanasia.

We are interested in very much being involved but also want to reiterate that we are a commission of volunteers without budget, without staff and without authority.

And so if we were appointed to take on a much more active role as a blue ribbon type of commission, we would request the opportunity to have possibly a special project manager such as I understand Measure U has had and also some engagement with the HR, the auditor's office and the city attorney office so that we could move forward with actions to address some of the challenges that have been identified in this audit.

I wanted to say that as was reported our needs assessment came out last year and this integrates nicely with the findings of our needs assessment that the campus is insufficient to meet the needs of the animals and the community.

Some of you have encouraged us to talk with partners like the county. We have actually been to the county per Chair Dickinson's request that we learn a little bit more about the county services.

They indicated that they don't have excess capacity to help us with our capacity and we have also learned more about their shelter. For example, they are on seven acres while we are on 1.7 acres.

So we are trying to learn a bit more about how their facility was built. We are working to address the questions that you have put to us and we are also.

Thank you for your comments. Jim, how to our final speaker on this item.

And Leah, thank you for your work with the commission, by the way, to you and all the commissioners.

Good afternoon, council members. I will be brief. I submitted a letter to you with my concerns about the portions of the audit that address Friends of Front Street Shelter.

I am the past president of Friends of Front Street Shelter. I retired from the board in February. So I am not here speaking for the board today.

But I am the person who primarily communicated with the auditors during their run up to the report that they gave you today.

I don't want you to see my silence in the face of what I think are some problematic conclusions and recommendations as agreement with those.

And in particular, I think some of those agreements and recommendations would be problematic if they made their way into a memorandum of understanding.

I don't oppose the idea of a memorandum of understanding, but it needs to be based on valid law and valid facts.

And I think that in some sense the audit is lacking in those areas. Thanks very much.

Thanks for your comments. Thanks for your volunteering and for your donations. That's very much appreciated. No question about that.

I think that completes our speakers for this. Vice Mayor, did you want to ask some questions of staff or get some comments from staff?

Yes. I think Mayor Pro Tem, you're up first. So I'll let you. Okay, sounds good.

Phillip, for the recommendation five on the accurate reporting on open data portal, it sounds like there's two different data portals that your team is putting information into.

And then there's the public one and probably an internal one. And can you kind of explain that?

Yes. So our department has an open data portal. And so it was something that we, when it was brought to our attention, it was just an IT glitch reached out to IT.

It's already taken care of. And then as Julian mentioned, we have our own on our website. You can see our daily stats, our yearly stats, our month to month stats.

And that's all live on our website. And we regularly monitor that.

So now they have now merged the two different websites or?

There's two different data sets. Okay.

Go to our website for one. You can go to our department's open data.

Okay. Okay. I think that's important. And I think the finding number 10 of how many volunteers, 861 volunteers and 93,000 hours speaks to like the volume and the love that Sacramento has for our four-legged friends.

And then your department and trying to find staff to fill the roles and your limited budget. I know everyone on your team has a heart also for four-legged friends.

And it's like, how do we combine everyone that loves pets? Everyone that wants to help out and be a good human here in Sacramento to help our four-legged friends together.

And I think that the agreement, the finding a really formalizing an agreement with partner, not like our partners and our nonprofits is going to be really important for next steps because there needs to be really clear goals.

This is what we hope to achieve. This is how much money we hope you guys can help us fundraise. This will allow us to fill these positions and allow us to continue funding these positions.

So we don't have to cut someone if we know and everyone's going to live up to their different promises of these positions, right? You want to go into a job with certainty.

And we got to make sure that we give the friends as a front street also information and data that they can share so that they can market our, for our front street animal shelter and that they can tell people donors, hey, this is what we were able to do with your money.

We were able to accomplish X, Y and Z. It gives people more hope in our government institution to be able to continue giving donations. And so I think having an agreement as next step is really important for me and I'm happy to be a part of that conversation.

Yeah, and to touch on a couple of the things that one did the MOU I think is very important. I mean, we do a good, a good job already the shelter we put out our annual report and so does friends as well. And they do have a lot of overlap because we do work very closely together.

But I do do strongly agree that MOU is is required with any organization that the city would go into conflict with or have a partnership with.

And that's the thing that we have the commission, then we have the friends, and then we have the city council and then you're in then obviously your staff. And so I think we need a common it like have a meeting with all the parties involved and figure out what our best process is going to be to help our four legged friends and be able to fund raise more market and improve our

program. So yeah, and again, you mentioned staffing and I think it's really it's important to know that as Julia mentioned this this this job is tough no matter what the position is that you hold and so the average turnover rate is about 34%.

And so we've averaged about 33 over the last couple of years. We've made incredible strides currently we have seven vacancies we've identified four candidates for those seven. So after interviews next week we may be fully staffed first time in the history of the shelter.

So that's again a testament to the work is tough but it is really rewarding. I also want to mention the spaying in the neutering.

Nobody disagrees that spaying in the neutering is a great thing.

There's two facets. There's resources, which is funding, and then there's actually the staff that do it.

Again, the foster to adopt program which you know I know I've spoken with several council members about it. It's, it was a decision that shelters across the country had to make there were no other options we weren't going to hold those animals in the shelter and

we didn't have veterinarians and support staff. And so we had to do that. The highest we got to in Sacramento was 872 animals and foster to adopt.

As many of you may know we have a partnership with Animal Balance that we brought in at the end of February. And I can report as of last night that 872 animals is now down to 91 dogs and 19 cats.

So again, when you have the ability to do high volume spaying neuter, you can, you can do it. Our facility is not set up to do it. And again, funding for public spaying neuter, we would all love to do it.

We would all love to be able to pay for it, whether that city or through donor dollars. But again, there's just not the capacity in our community because there's not the staff to provide that.

And I'm not talking about our staff, but just in other community partners. We just don't have it.

Okay. Thank you so much. And thank you to our city auditor's office for producing this report and the recommendations that come with it. Thank you.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem, go ahead.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. First, I just want to thank Jim and, you know, and his time with the friends of Front Street and I acknowledge this, this, this concern.

So first off, I'll, I'll go ahead and move the, the staff report to move to accept the staff report before the city council, Mr. Chair, with the direction that the city auditor communicate with, you know, Jim and the concerns identified prior to coming to council and see if there's any response to that at the, for our council approval.

And so that'll be my, my motion first. And then I want to also thank, you know, you know, Jim and Paula treat and all the others who've been big advocates for friends of Front Street and, and as well, Leah and Paul, you know, who, you know, have not only our commissioners, but regular volunteers at the Front Street shelter and, and, and our, and gave me a great walk through to see,

the day to day from, from not only the employee sample, but a volunteer standpoint. And so the first, you know, I guess concern or question maybe for Phillip here on this is start, let's start off with on the budget side. There's no question.

Our first item on the budget and not it was the, the fiscal outlook. And one of the recommendations was on the licensing fee recovery. What, what, what has been the significant challenges for us compare to our comparables in actually increasing the number of registrants and in licensing fees.

So prior to 2022, we did all of our licensing in house staffing challenges, COVID. And so it, there was a backlog. So we outsourced it to organization called docuPET. So we have seen an increase.

And now we can issue you a site, but now we're going to issue a citation. So it really does all come down to staffing resources. And so again, coupled with our agreement with docuPET and having the staff to be out in the field enforcing it.

I believe we're going to be able to increase that rate.

Okay. So maybe this might be a good test case for the Measure U commission, because there is a, there's a, there's a tipping point on fees, right? I'm wondering what if we're doing full cost recovery. And then second, you know, maybe full cost recovery might actually reduce the number of fees, registrants that we get. I don't know that, that whether that's true or not.

But, but I almost equated towards tipping fees, you know, on the solid waste site. We want more people registered for public health purposes, but also for revenue purposes. So I'd like to see what, what are a response back when we come to council on what are the strategies with our contract or, or in-house what we're going to do to manage to increase those, those fees.

The second point that relates to finding number two and finding number ten, clearly, you know, they're clearly because of our fiscal challenges, staffing and recruitment and retention is critical. And so volunteer recruitment and retention.

Because we did have volunteers who unfortunately were injured as part of that. And to see, I mean, I think Vice Mayor Talamant has made a great observation, the fact that we have over 800 specific individual volunteer visits is just commendable.

The fact that we're running a department in that way. Now, it's also concerning that we're running a department in that way, but that is the challenge that we face.

So can you speak to the findings on the issue of recruit, of retention? And, and if there are other thoughts on obviously recruitment on employee side is financial, but on the volunteer side, maybe discuss that.

Yeah. So in this industry, the, the most well resourced government or nonprofit shelter, you can never have enough volunteers, regardless of your funding. You can never have enough.

Whether that be for foster volunteers or people helping in the shelter. So the, the retention piece is important.

But the, the number of hours is really valuable as well. I did, I was at a conference last week and checked with our, our city's vendor that we use for volunteer, our volunteer, different city volunteer programs and said, Hey, is there, is there a way for you to get us this information without us having to spend staff time?

And the answer was no. Unfortunately, it doesn't do that. You're going to have to spend staff time to extract that data to get that. So it's something we can look into.

But I think it's, it's, is it worth the staff time when we know that we're getting almost 100,000 hours of free labor? You know, it's a decision that we'll have to, we'll have to make.

Sure. I understand. And fair point on the, you know, obviously someone who's spending more time there is going to have as a volunteer or as an employee is obviously going to have be accustomed to the, the safety techniques and, and be comfortable with that.

Versus every time you bring a new person in, you're training them on every, on a new piece. So to that point. And so I guess, you know, when I think about, you know, who then are primary volunteers, folks who are retiring, who've got that extra time, you know, and, and maybe a little more income and resources, they tend to be our donors too.

So I guess I would like to see what, what are the techniques that we can implore on both of those as we come to council. So thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. I also have a couple of comments. You're welcome to stay there and respond to anything that you might like. I certainly endorse the comments of my colleagues. And I wasn't quite sure I heard the cortisol to the motion that you made, but was it to look at?

Yes. For the city auditor, there was a concern. There was legal concerns questions on the report related to the MOU. So I'd like the city auditor to at least, you know, confer with the Mr. Jim, you know, I would help. I was, I was mispronounced your last name, but you know, so my, my mispronounce all the time.

Okay.

Yeah.

But as it comes to council.

Okay. And one of the things that I'd like the staff to respond to when we get to get to the council, not necessarily today as Leah's request for some staff for support for the commission. So you don't have to say anything today. You don't have to say no today.

I believe we already do. And I understand that there is a second ask, depending upon where we may decide to go, which we will make recommendations from the staff side to council.

Yeah, if we just make sure that that gets gets addressed, I think that would be appropriate.

Overall, you know, as someone who is new to the city council, but not necessarily new to animal care issues.

This audit knocked me back a little bit. I mean it, it's a call for a lot of a lot of work to be done. And I'm encouraged that that you were talking about the staffing hopefully coming closer to having

filled vacancies. But I know already from my, my relatively short tenure on the council, how North Sacramento is the place that seems to generate more calls than any other part of the city and where the priority one calls are the dangerous animals are.

Although I realize that most of those calls were getting responded to in an earlier or earlier timeframe, but a lot, a lot of this comes back to having both at the shelter and in the field, the people you need to do and that are good competent capable people who hopefully stay with the city and with animal care for

I did, Liam referred to this, I did suggest talking to what the county and SPCA doing, looking at, looking at are there better ways to share what we're doing, not that they have a, either one of the organizations have a big surplus in capacity or personnel for that matter.

But our world right now, and this applies to a lot more than just animal care is figuring out how we do more with the people we have. And if we can, in some fashion or form, cooperate with other animal care organizations and, and agencies that allows us all collectively to provide a higher and better quality of service with the resources we have.

Our job is to, is to take that step, it seems to me. So I'm a great believer that there are a number of areas in which our governmental agencies could work better together to have, to have improved results for our residents and citizens of both this county and the, and the region.

And I think animal care is, is a prime example of that. So, so I'd be interested as, as this audit goes to the, to the full council and having a little bit further dialogue on, on conversations or arrangements or whatever the status is among the different organizations and entities.

They all face these same issues, the, the, the potential conflicts of issues, conflicts issues, the, the control issues, the appropriate role issues, I mean, all those things. So, so in that respect, maybe there is something that you can glean from arrangements that other friends organizations have with their, I don't, I don't know that you call them parent, but, but they're sponsoring entities.

That, that would be beneficial for you in trying to construct what this MOU or agreement, whatever it's going to be between the city and the, and the friends is. So, I think there's something we can learn in that respect.

And finally, you alluded to this, I think, and actually I remember now you did. The best thing we can do, I have become firmly convinced of this over the years. The best thing we can do is be as aggressive as possible about Spain-Newt.

We are not going to reduce the unwanted pet population, the, and the, you know, the abandoned and stray pet population until we do a much, and when I say we, I'm talking about the global we, until we do a much better job of, of having Spain and Newt are taking care of for, for, for our pet population.

And we, we, and again, the global, that includes us as members of council. We need to engage the, the vet community. We need, we need to go hammer on UC Davis. We need to do whatever we can to encourage both of, both the facilities, if there are mobile or temporary facilities we can use and the, and the personnel of vets and cedar.

And support staff to, to increase what we do in the way of Spain-Newt. I would say that if I were back where I used to be a few years ago, I would be saying the very same thing. And that did say the very same thing. So it's not picking on the, on you or the, or the city.

the, you made the comment, everybody agrees, Spain-Newt is a good thing. But how do we, how do we, in the greater scheme of all the priorities, how do we operationalize a greater priority and effectiveness of Spain-Newt in our community? That would be my, my question again. I'd be interested in more discussion of that in the context as this issue goes to the full council rather than have you, have you respond off the cuff to, to, except to the extent that you'd like to, like to comment on that.

Those are my, those are my principal thoughts about the audit.

Okay. Two things. Again, your district does have the highest intake numbers. So I want to acknowledge that. Also with field services and again when the audit came out, I was pleasantly shocked that our response times to priority one calls were as good as they were because I was expecting them to be much worse.

At one time we had over 2000 pending calls. We're under 500 now since the hiring of the chief and the additional officers since January. So again, just a huge decreasing calls and I know all the council members and I know myself get lots of, less some complaints via email.

So again, major strides in that area as well. Spain-Newt, again, it is a, it's a huge thing. UC Davis is, they're, they're, they're struggling again because there's only so many spots. We do have internships that we bring in vets. We call them baby vets into our facility.

What we try to do is convince them to become veterinarians in shelters. That's our goal. They don't bring a lot of volume because they're, they're baby vets. They're new. So our vets are having to slow down to show them.

So that's not necessarily, it really is the large volume. So the Sacramento SPCA right now, they are set up to do, they can do 100 and 150 animals in a day if they have the appropriate staffing. They have the facility. Right now, if any of us were to call them to get our own dog spade, they have a six month waiting list.

So that's a serious, that's a serious problem in our community alone. Being that they're a high, high volume, low cost clinic.

I don't know what the solution is that we're all going to be able to get together to make that happen. But it is going to take funding.

And it's, it's, it's going to take more veterinarians and more support staff. And I would just like to touch on this because I think it's, I think it is important.

As the auditors mentioned, this is difficult work. Veterinarians, I believe are second in suicide to police officers and firefighters.

When our shelter staff are beat up, personally attacked. That's also what causes them to leave.

And I think that's really important. And I know I've had several conversations with council members about that. And I just think it's, I want to take a time right now to address that because that is a, it's a serious problem.

Nobody in our organization is signing up to make a lot of money. And you should be able to come to work and you should be able to go home and not have people come to your house.

That's important as well. Just like all of these other things are important. We show up to work every single day and the work is more than we can possibly get done.

And so I just, I want to take the time and I'll take the time again at the next council meeting because I think it's important that the public hears from me.

And I would also like for some of you to hear in the public to hear from my staff because this is, this is tough work. And again, when I saw the audit, I, I freaked out too.

But again, just, I think we need to use it as a guiding post and guide us all in the, all in the right direction.

Well, I certainly appreciate those comments and I know we all share them with respect to supporting all city employees and particularly those in public contact positions who are often exposed in, in ways that the general public doesn't necessarily realize.

So those comments are certainly appropriate. So, I, I, you know, I mean, the reality is that we don't see a lot more funding in the near term.

So, so I mean, I'm back to how do we, again, working with others, how do we do more with the resources we've got?

And maybe, you know, maybe there are applications of technology. Some jurisdictions are starting to heavily use drones.

Is that something that it would make sense to look at to track dangerous and loose animals rather than have a animal control field officer trying to, trying to run around and track down an animal?

Maybe, maybe there are better ways we can do things. So, so my invitation to you is to think beyond what the standard protocols and operations are and have been to, what are the applications?

And I'm back to what I was having, talking to Pete about. What are the outcomes you want? And then what are the creative and non-traditional ways beyond what we're doing potentially to get to those outcomes?

That's, that's my invitation. So, Vice Mayor.

And just on another note, I was on the news a lot for Wolf Dogs in my community and Philip and his team helped me get them. And then they actually went to a sanctuary for wolves. So thank you.

It's a great example. Thank you.

Thank you.

If we don't have other comments or questions, we have a motion by Mayor Pro Temguera in a second. All in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Those say no. Any abstentions? That motion carries. So we'd accept the audit and send it on to the full council. Thank you. Thank you all for your comments and questions and being here this morning and this afternoon.

Our next item is an audit of the Sacramento Ethics Commission, item six on our agenda. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon. Chair Dickinson and members of the budget and audit committee. My name is Frishtar O'Rourke, your city auditor. The recommendation that is before you is to accept the audit of the Sacramento Ethics Commission and forward it to the full city council for final approval.

So the city created the Ethics Commission in 2018 as part of an effort to increase transparency and trust by establishing the good governance framework. The program consists of four parts. First, the sunshine ordinance.

The council adopted a sunshine ordinance aimed at enhancing the public's participation and transparency in government. The stated purpose was to enhance the public's ability to participate in the city's decision making process and have access to public information and records.

Second was the code of ethics. The council adopted a code of ethics for city officials, appointed officers and city employees to promote open government transparency, ethics and accountability. Third was establishing the office of ethics and compliance.

The council approved the funding for the establishment of the ethics and compliance office to be embedded in the city clerk's office to provide a training and education component for the ethics program. And then fourth was establishment of the Ethics Commission.

So the city council established the Ethics Commission to review, investigate and consider complaints alleging violations of various city ethics laws.

The overall goal of the good governance program was to achieve the greatest level of compliance to city codes and policies, as well as applicable state law by elected officials and all city employees through training and compliance monitoring.

As can be seen, the council envisioned that these four different elements would function together to further these goals.

The Ethics Commission was established to provide the enforcement component of the, to the framework. The commission was authorized to review, investigate and consider complaints.

The bodies of law the commission has jurisdiction over includes city charter section governing future employment, city code chapter regulating campaign practices and chapters governing campaign financing and spending.

City code chapter regulating lobbyist registration and reporting a code city code chapters related to transparency, ethics and conflicts of interest. And finally the city code rules of city, city council rules of procedure.

It's important to note that this body was designed as complaint based in that they're not authorized to initiate independently. The commission was provided a limited jurisdiction over elected officials, candidates for elected office, lobbyists, city council appointed

officers like the city attorney and the city auditor and commissioners on city advisory boards and commissions. The commission was empowered to design and implement procedures for the investigation, adjudication and fine setting for individuals found to have violated codes and laws under its purview.

The city provided the Ethics Commission investigative staff support through contracting with an independent evaluator to conduct investigations and make recommendations on culpability and levies.

The code also contemplates the city may enter into a contract with the FPPC for investigations and enforcement of campaign finance laws.

Finally the city provided that staff support be provided by the city clerk's office and currently the city clerk staffs the Ethics Commission.

As I mentioned, the city code provides the Ethics Commission in consultation with the city attorney's office to establish procedures guiding the complaint intake, investigation and adjudication of complaints.

The procedures establish the contents that must be present in a complaint for consideration by the commission. First, the complaint should be on the form prepared by the city clerk, which is available on the clerk's website.

The clerk can also accept complaints not filed on the form if the complaint includes enough information to engage in initial review.

Second, a complaint must provide as much detail as possible, including if known, the provision of the Ethics laws alleged to have been violated, the facts constituting each alleged violation, the name and address of each respondent and the name and address of any potential witnesses.

And finally, a complaint should identify the complainant. However, the clerk can accept anonymous complaints if the complaint includes enough information for the clerk to allow to conduct the initial review.

The procedures also provide the process for the intake review and investigation of complaints. The first set of procedures that were passed in October 2018 established the initial procedures.

The commission made some substantive changes to the procedures in February 2021 that established the backbone of the complaint disposition process.

And then there have been a couple of updates to the procedures in September 2022 and September 2024. The current procedures established three main steps in the process.

The first step is the initial review process and it's completed by the city clerk. Here the clerk reviews the complaint and does one of the following.

They can refer the complaint to the independent evaluator for a preliminary evaluation, can refer the complaint to another city department, the FPPC or another governmental agency with jurisdiction, or dismiss the complaint for lack of jurisdiction.

For cases that are referred to the independent evaluator, the evaluator conducts a preliminary evaluation where when the evaluator determines that sufficient cause to warrant a full investigation exists, they can proceed with the investigation.

And where the evaluator does not find cause to proceed, a no cause report is presented to the commission as an agenda item for discussion in a public meeting. The commission may accept the independent evaluator's recommendation not to investigate further, or they may still direct the evaluator to conduct an investigation.

And when the evaluator conducts an investigation, they provide the commission a report that includes a narrative summary of information gathered, a determination whether each ethics law and the allegation was violated, a recommendation action or a recommendation that the independent evaluator conduct further investigation report back to the commission, or a recommendation to refer the complaint to the FPPC or another governmental agency.

So this report identified five findings and makes 11 recommendations aimed at improving the city's good governance program and the ethics commission. We found that opportunity exists for the city to strengthen its internal control environment over the agencies charged with operating the good governance program.

And in the first finding, we found that the city should consider conducting strategic planning to document objectives, design action plans and monitor activities over the development and delivery of outreach and training programs, and over the good governance program.

So that process typically includes initiating the strategic planning process, setting the goals and objectives, creating an action plan, and developing a monitoring plan.

As a result, the city can more efficiently provide direction, monitor the activities and measure the effectiveness of the ethics commission and the Office of the Clerk's Stewardship of the Good Governance Program.

Our second finding is focused on providing greater resources for training and advice that would benefit both commissioners seeking to enforce and individuals seeking to comply with the city's ethics laws.

First, we found that the ethics commissioners would benefit from additional training or education concerning the laws and regulations under their purview.

A critical component of effective compliance programs is continuously improving and adapting to changing customers' laws, leading practices, and environments in which they operate.

As we discussed in the finding, the commission has not been provided robust onboarding and training on the rules and regulations under their purview.

And many ethics and campaign experts stress that these laws are complex, such as the laws governing campaign contribution and finance.

And so without the adequate training, the commissioners may not have a complete understanding of the ethics laws and programs.

So we recommend that the mayor and council in consultation with the attorney's office and other care holders determine a training curriculum for the commissioners.

Second, we found that those that seek to comply with the ethics laws would benefit from the city providing greater resources to clarify and advise on the laws.

The city created the ethics commission to establish an oversight function to enforce a series of these codes.

However, the good governance program that exists today, there's no support made available by the city to help individuals seeking to comply with the laws.

We found that benchmark cities do provide different sources and methods to support individuals.

These can include production of support materials like frequently asked questions and videos guiding through issues.

Additionally, we found that other cities provide advice informally and in some cases formally to individuals seeking assistance.

And so we recommend that the council direct staff to create a collection of information providing guidance and consider directing staff to evaluate the cost of a function of providing some level of advice.

For the third finding, it focuses on potential improvements to the complaint intake and reporting procedures.

First, we found that the review of complaints can be improved by an automating the complaint intake process.

So more specifically, as we discussed earlier in the presentation, there are several methods that an individual can submit a complaint.

Some include the online complaint form over the phone or by submitting materials through mail.

And we found during our audit that there was a complaint that was filed that did not make it on the complaint log.

And so to reduce that risk, we recommend having an automated complaint intake process.

Second, the commission procedures state that information about the identity of the complainants and respondents not be included on the complaint logs.

And we found in some instances where the names of the respondents and complainants were included.

And so we're recommending that we develop a more thorough review process to ensure that the identity of those individuals is protected.

And then third, we found that robust disclosure of the rationale for complaint dismissal can help inform the complaint review and discussion by the ethics commission.

The commission exists largely as an adjudicary body, leaving administrative duties to the city clerk staff.

These duties include the intake of the complaints and as described earlier, collecting the complaints, checking to determine if the complaint is complete, and then conducting an initial review of the complaints.

And so for those in that initial review, if the complaint is dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, we found that including a little bit more information on the complaint logs as to what that lack of jurisdiction was

and if there was any sort of review and analysis by the city attorney's office, including some of that information into the complaint log, can help the commissioners have more sufficient information on determining whether or not there's a worthwhile allegation to pursue.

Recent changes to the operations of city's boards and commissions through the city council's personnel and public employees committee highlights opportunities for the city to update its policies to clarify expectations and consistency in seeking staff support and providing

recommendations.

So first we found that the city can establish a process for the ethics commission to formalize requests for staff support.

So recently the council updated the rules of procedures to streamline the operation of the city's boards and commissions and under the new rubric, staffing for most boards and commissions is born in the city clerk's office.

And it requires the commission to submit to the council's PNPE committee as part of the annual report a work plan for items that the commission plans to focus on in the coming year.

We believe that the work plan should also include estimated staffing needed to complete the work.

And this will provide more information for the PNPE committee and the city council in determining whether or not the work plan submitted by the ethics commission is something that they want to approve.

And then for second part of the legislation, the council provided the commission with the power and duty to report to the city council recommendations regarding subjects under its purview.

The commission has issued a series of annual reports that include recommendations during the process of presenting the recommendations to the various legislative bodies.

Council members at committee and at council have provided some direction.

However, those are, we found that those recommendations were not memorialized in any meaningful way.

And so the recommendations had remained unchanged.

We believe that the city could benefit from establishing a form for the presentation of recommendations and identify the exact type of information that should be included.

In our discussions with the city clerk, she expressed the potential for having more than just the ethics commission, but all boards and commission use similar recommendation format.

And then finally, our last finding addresses contracts with the California Fair Political Practices Commission or the FPPC.

The city entered into a contract with FPPC in February 2018 to assist in the administration, implementation and enforcement of campaign law.

The contract stated that FPPC would provide campaign law enforcement and interpretation, including auditing enforcement advice, education, training and legal review.

Prior to the contract expiration in December 2019, the city clerk indicated that she and the attorney's office were negotiations with the FPPC to extend or renew the contract.

However, I think those negotiations fell through due to some concerns related to a $55,000 floor amount that was in the original contract and FPPC not wanting to include a do not exceed amount in our contract.

The city clerk stated that this information was communicated to the chair of the ethics commission.

And during this time, the city had started grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic so the ethics commission didn't hold any meetings for about eight months.

And so this was never brought back to the city's ethics commission in a meeting to discuss it.

During our audit, some commissioners did indicate that they have requested to discuss renewal of the contract.

However, since that contract has been expired for years, the clerk has stated that the commission's review of the contract is not necessary and the services are being now provided by the clerk's office and the independent evaluator.

But like I mentioned, commissioners believe they should have an opportunity to discuss the potential renewal of the contract.

And so we believe that the city council would benefit from a discussion about clarifying the ethics commission's powers and duties to review and make recommendations to the contract with the FPPC.

This concludes my presentation.

I'd like to thank the clerk's office, the ethics commission, the city attorney's office for their assistance and collaboration during this audit.

I do want to note that a management response from the clerk's office and the ethics commission are included in our audit at the end of the report.

I'm available to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you for the presentation.

Do we have comments or questions first from council members?

Do we have anyone who wishes to speak?

I don't.

Okay, we have no public comment on this item.

Although I see the chair and vice chair of the ethics commission hiding out back there.

Not so much hiding, pretty obvious.

So first, I would like to ask Linda or Alan or both to come forward anyway, even though you didn't sign up to speak, you wrote a very detailed and lengthy letter in response to the audit.

And I think it would benefit us to have whatever comments you'd like to make.

Well, since the inception of the commission in 2018, this is really the most comprehensive review of our work to date.

And Alan and I support this report and we ask the council to consider supporting us, supporting the auditor so that we can improve our work and do a better job to be more transparent and to build public trust.

Thank you, Linda.

Alan, did you want to add anything?

Thank you, Mr. Chair, members of the committee.

I will say that chairing and I represent very different perspectives as commissioner in the sense that chairing is among the original commissioners appointed seven years ago.

I am among the newest commissioners only appointed last year.

There's a lot of meta themes and subtext in that audit.

And even giving us the context of our commission in the context of the four good government resolutions was completely new to me.

And that speaks to the onboarding issue.

And I will quickly say a thought about this.

The onboarding I got as a planning commissioner 12 years ago on the discreet issue of just being independent and avoiding conflicts was a lot more robust than what I got as an ethics commissioner.

But the big meta issue is understanding our work in the context of the good government reforms.

And I have gotten the general sense that many actors in the city believe that our role is to be a very passive recipient of complaints.

And the complaint process is problematic in ways that I'm quite prepared to illustrate in detail.

But as I've struggled to understand this, I really believe that our role is in the context of as an oversight entity.

So if there's not something that's explicitly in the ordinance in this four entity graph that the auditor gave you, I believe it's appropriate for us to inquire about that, to ask questions about that and serve an oversight role.

And I believe it's important for us to get access to good information to help us do that.

There's a lot that's very helpful to that in the complaint discussion.

Only in the last five months have I even begun to get my head around how our complaint process works.

We get to know almost nothing.

I do have some thoughts about some specific complaints that I've gotten some information on for a variety of reasons.

And I think there's a lot to look at.

And I'm not 100% sure it's happening exactly as it was intended on paper.

But I'm reluctant to conclude anything specifically because I'm still only barely scratching the surface to understand the level of information to know if the things that I think might be slightly awry,

nothing hugely controversial, but things meriting oversight.

And just not yet ready to make any conclusions because it's been that difficult to get information.

Those are my comments. Thank you.

Well, you know, I appreciate those and my colleagues have some comments and questions, but I would invite you to, if you wish, have time in the interest to detail some of those as this goes to the full council and perhaps stimulate that discussion that you're referring to,

but I think we're not going to dive into more deeply this well this afternoon now.

But I think it would be of interest to the council to have those those observations that you're referring to Alan. Absolutely.

Don't go away just yet.

I have the vice mayor.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you both for your time and your commitment to the commission. Appreciate all the work that you guys have.

I do have a question for the city auditor. So I don't know.

And for finding number two, who typically staffs the ethics commissions and other cities in the city attorney's office or the city clerk's office.

There's staff from both the city attorney's office and the clerk's office at the ethics commission meetings was typically Mindy.

And then I think there's Gary.

Gary Lindsay from the attorney's office also staffs it.

So in other cities, the city clerk's office takes the role.

Oh, is that what you were referring to? Yeah.

Other cities like what is a typical protocol?

It does typically reside in the clerk's office.

If it's the similar structure as ours.

And then there are other ethics commissions that are completely independent to have their own staff.

Okay, so on recommendation four, I know there's the option like, okay, who's going to continue following up city attorney city clerk or contractor.

I don't want to do a contractor. I think this needs to be done in house.

Just for the advice. Yeah. Yeah.

So I do think that it should be done in house.

And it should be staff by our city clerk's office and obviously a little counsel.

Sure. I mean, we do kind of go into like reasons where it could be.

So I think that's a good idea.

Not a good idea to have because providing advice on potentially legal issues from people who are looking to comply.

It might not be the appropriate avenue to have the city clerk respond to that just with not having that legal background.

And then sometimes there might be some sort of conflicts just in, you know, having it come from the attorney's office as well.

So clerk attorney or contractor.

Okay, got it.

And then on finding number five, the FPC and the contract that we had with them and now we don't.

I mean, violating that, like what did they do for the commission prior to the contract being expired?

What did they do that at the FPC?

Yeah, they conducted some audits.

They did provide some advice on campaign finance.

That's under the city's, you know, the city's laws.

And remember.

So were they supporting the commission here or were they supporting staff and supporting the commission?

I guess that's my question.

And we'll have Kevin answer that.

Yeah, Kevin Christensen City Auditor's Office.

So the FPC was originally envisioned as kind of a central part of how this good governance program would work, right?

So the city council established a series of campaign finance laws that went a little farther than what the FPC regulates in state law.

So they brought the FPC on board and a critical function of this, I guess, as alluded to at the time, was this advice piece that candidates and city council members would be able to call and receive some kind of advice to comply with these laws that as you guys know are pretty complex.

So that I think was the basically the critical function of that contract.

Now they were, to your question about who they were designed to support, I think it was more, they were kind of a corollary to the oversight function, right?

So complaints would be filed with the FPC and adjudicated by that body.

In the absence of that contract, the complaints are now filed with the commission and are now adjudicated by the commission.

They're investigated by the independent evaluator.

A report is provided to the ethics commission.

And the ethics commission makes decisions based on those reports.

However, what went away and has not really come back is this issue of advice where people can turn to if they do have questions about how to comply.

Okay. Thank you.

Pro Tem.

Yeah, thank you very much.

First, thank you to the city auditor.

And one, I'll go ahead and move approval of this item to the city full city council chair.

I do want to, you know, for the city clerks office and city attorney's office.

I do think that we need to look at a level of training involved in this.

And maybe that's, I'm looking over at the city, an interim city manager's office because we're going through the budget.

I mean, all of this is in the context of the upcoming budget.

But it is imperative that our ethics commissioners get not only training on their role, but also a little bit of the history on this.

And I was here at the beginning when we actually approved this.

And we had Common Cause, we had McGeorge School of Law, we had, I think it was also King Hall had given some advice in this.

Our first commissioners, thank you, Commissioner Ng for chairing for your, you know, your years of this involved in this.

And so, so I, and at that, and at the start of it, we had a lot of folks involved in it.

But as, as like does any commission, as new elements come in, they're not coming in with, say, that level of involvement and engagement and the process of that.

They're, they're coming into sometimes a, an already informed body.

And we make the assumption that the new commissioner is going to be at that same level of education, which is not the case.

I mean, we face it on the council here all the time.

And what happened in this scenario is we've lost many commissioners as through the cycles were in.

So now we have, you know, chairing, who's I think one of our last original commissioners that have been there.

So I do think that the onboarding is critical from, from the start.

And it's such an important function that I do think that that's, I think a immediate starting point where we need to think about, okay, let's make sure that everyone is versed on what our city role does.

As it, as it relates to the, the contract.

And if I remember the discussion, it also had to do with, we were just starting the commission.

And being able to try to get our city up to speed, it was faster at that point to just say, well, we live in the same city as the PPC.

And I think back then it was literally two blocks away over here on fifth and, and J Street at that point.

And, and that partly was also because of the function of our clerk and our city attorneys.

And I think that's a good point to have, but we're kind of moving already to that, to the internal level where, where we were.

What I do think is, is would be a benefit because I, I also, I see the conflict of having a unlimited contract with the FPPC.

And then where does that, where does that cost end?

But, but the challenge with that, and here's where I think the further discussion we should have as a council is that advice piece.

That there are over the, over the last few years, number of years now, there have been number of folks I've encountered that said, we want to comply, but we don't know what the rule is.

And even sometimes the city attorney's office, you know, has indicated that they didn't want to give advice to, to, to a, either a candidate or an interest group or someone, because that should be a cost to somebody else.

So, so, so I think there, there's a, there's a disconnect there that we need to get because an, an, an outside entity, whether it's a candidate or another outside entity can go hire their own attorney to get their own advice.

But then the interpretation from our city may be different.

So this is why I think having some level of advice would be, will be important.

Again, that's, that comes down to a financial cost issue and how much we're, we're, we're going to set aside for that piece.

So a little bit of history on, on that part there.

So as, as we move forward in this, I do think number one, I think the training piece is critical and then figuring out how can we provide that service so that those who want to comply

have, make sure that they have that correct advice as well as, as they interpret our codes.

And then finally as goes with every, every, we've talked about this now for multiple different boards and commissions.

I, and this is a charge I think for P and P.

E. You know, the formalization and recommendation process for staff and reporting.

I think that we have to try to figure out how to get that across the board.

I think that's, those are probably the, the two major points and then the one that's, I think the same for all of them.

So Mr. Chair, that'll, that'll be my motion and commentary.

That's well said.

We have a second.

I wanted to ask the clerk if she had any comments she would like to make.

Thank you, Chair.

It was really a pleasure working with our auditors and really looking at our ethics commission to make sure we're effective.

And so I appreciate all of their findings.

We've had great conversations about it.

And my responses are in the staff report.

Okay.

I do think the structural issues are, are worthy of examination, although they were beyond at least as the commission raises them in their, in their letter,

in its letter, I suppose I should say that it's beyond the scope of the, of the audit.

So perhaps that's something that the council in the future will want to, will want to consider in light of, of how effective the recommendations that the audit makes turn out to be in terms of,

of implementation, I would say with respect to the advice issue, you know, advice of, advice of council is, is not a defense.

That's true.

If the FPPC, within its jurisdiction decides that you haven't come in, come in, come in, so there's some problems.

Asking not, not just government attorney, private attorney, anybody, if the FPPC decides, deans to disagree with the, with the object of the investigation.

So that's why I think I've, you see a lot of lawyers who are very reluctant to, to give advice because they know that you, as the, as the client can't, can't rely on it, which is its own little curly queue in the, in the whole system.

So thank you all.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Susan, I didn't say that you wanted to come in, please.

Usually the lawyer is really, really quiet, but you know, Mayor Putnam get a, I wasn't here when you passed that ordinance with the council pass ordinance.

So, but my understanding is exactly as you presented FPPC initially was thought to do this service.

And so I think with the independent evaluator now and all of the jurisdiction going back to the ethics commission.

We haven't had a contractual arrangement with the FPPC for years now.

I do actually am taking a lot of great suggestions though out of here. Certainly the onboarding makes sense.

We are able to in certain respects, provide advice on things as long as we, we fire all out the attorney, right, in our office.

So that attorney advises on these things and they don't have connection with anybody else.

And so I'm going to figure out how we could potentially do that to provide in-house advice.

In the meantime, we could look at FAQs because a candidate wins is a perfect example.

If you, if you start from the position that the cities, these laws are broader than the minimum contained under state law.

So the city council implemented these ordinances, but there really wasn't any, any previous set of laws for us to go by.

And so it was inventing as we went along. And so these are all, you know, very good recommendations.

I like, like the city clerk said, it was great working with the city auditor on this and kind of brainstorming how we make this stronger.

So anyways, so I appreciate the feedback. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you for the comments. And if there aren't further comments or questions, then we have a motion to accept the audit and send it on to the full council.

Again, with our thanks to all who participated in this and some work to do.

So with that, all those favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed say no. And any abstentions hearing none. The motion carries.

Thanks very much. We have one more agendized item, which is transit occupancy tax.

And this is just a follow on from the presentation to the full council. And I think council member Gowda has.

Yeah, Mr. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And this, this had more to do with the more realization, as I understood, was explained of TOT revenue being used to backfill some of the funding that hadn't been used in years past.

And so my concern here that I wanted to bring up was at that point that was one time allocation. And, and there were discussions about, okay, well, you know, is it one year or two year, but there was never, you know, and my colleague, you know, council member

was here at that time to any commitment for imperpatuity. So the purpose of bringing it to this discussion again was either to give an opportunity to have that response on how that occurred because that's not how at least the discussion occurred during the

at least, you know, from one board member, there's the the the use of it in perpetuity, I think is should not be included in that, and in that, in that recommendation. So that was the comment there.

Okay, and our city managers.

Good afternoon. Thank you. I, my understanding is the question was explicit to the two items each of 87,000 that were added between proposed to approved everything included in the proposed budget was permanent and ongoing, and it was stated as such in the proposed budget p

it's notting from the back of the room. Council did make some restorations that were one time in nature and those have been taken out of the proposed budget for the current year. It is April 22. The book is done. We will disclose to you when we release next month, month week, which items are included to TOT and permanent and ongoing will have to make some decisions about how to backfill

the backfill of that if council as a body decides that that's not how they want to fund the budget for the coming fiscal year.

So those will be identified in the budget. Correct. So that it's easy for all of us to adjust if we're not as familiar with it. That's correct. And you can see it actually already in the department. If you look through the lists, it's included in the lists. It was were part of the strategies and those and they were on the list last year as well.

And so when they were included in the proposed budget, it was assumed as and counted in the ongoing, not the one time of last year solutions and you will see the same in this year. And so those are adjustments that if if the majority of the body chooses to can make recommendations on how to swap out.

So to confirm from last year's motion to today, staff misunderstood what the original motion was and now has changed it.

No, there were two, two, two different proposals last year. There was what was included in the proposed budget. So staff said we're including the following shifts to the TOT in the proposed budget. Those were always counted in the column is permanent and ongoing.

During budget deliberations last year, there were two items each 87,000. I can't mosaic and Sacramento Center for history that were one time in nature. They were restorations proposed by the mayor and they were to be one time in nature.

Those have been taken out of the budget for 26. Okay, but only those that were explicitly articulated as one time in nature, which were the things that were done between proposed and approved.

So, yeah, so last year as to balance the budget for fiscal year 25.

There were roughly $4.5 million of funding shifts from the general fund over to TOT.

So, you know, as Laney mentioned, almost all of those were part of the proposed budget or that sorry, as the interim city manager mentioned, almost all of them were part of the proposed budget.

And so last year and considered ongoing and considered ongoing permanent and ongoing. And then so last year, the mayor brought forward a memo to restore various reductions.

So, two of them were going to be restored with the TOT and many others of them were going to be restored with the portion of the contribution to the economic uncertainty reserve.

So, all of the economic uncertainty reserve funded restorations were one time.

Those 287 ones we put in as ongoing. So, those are going to be included. We'll highlight those as well.

But as the interim city manager mentioned, council as part of the fiscal year 26 budget can say, hey, we don't want to use TOT for that anymore.

And we either want to shift that cost back to the general fund and we'll have to make a different reduction or, hey, we just want to reduce this outright.

And so we'll highlight those for council for council deliberation.

Thank you for clarifying Pete.

So let me make sure I understand.

There were a number of items that that that were considered ongoing and out of out of TOT that were in the budget that as as proposed by the city manager last year. Correct.

And that was like the Crocker visit, Crocker, I think the Center for History, the zoo, things like that were part of the proposed budget.

Okay. And then there were there was the Mozak and History Center.

The 287,000.

The 287,000 each.

That were restored by the mayor.

That came as part of the mayor's memo.

Exactly. But now they're considered ongoing.

Correct. So those we had considered ongoing and then the other kind of restorations that were funded with the economic reserve, those were all one time.

One time.

So are included. Yeah.

So just as we see the budget, we're going to see proposed allocations to those items considered ongoing.

Correct.

Whatever the number was plus the two.

Plus and then the the items that came out of economic uncertainty would be zeroed out for 26.

Okay. Okay.

Yes, sir.

Maybe this is the wrong phrase to use to a lawyer, but I don't want to litigate the past.

But so I just think, you know, comments moving forward.

I think what I saw at the last budget meeting at the council was at least, you know, four perplexed council members who did not see those as ongoing expenses.

And I would.

Yes, the two, the two and and even more so a concern of from a larger group of the body.

And again, I'm not going to speak for anybody else of the use of the to dollars for ongoing expenses as well.

So and I again, I think that, you know, we're in a great year of uncertainty.

So I'm not saying that it's not appropriate that it wouldn't that it would not be appropriate or that it would be appropriate to use those this year.

I just think it is it and this maybe this is more of a signal to the staff because I don't want to blindside at least, you know, but I do think that identifying to dollars, you know, for ongoing expenses.

How to get through this this this particular year of uncertainty.

Your preference at least would be to identify not just the two, but the others that are coming from to T that were considered ongoing.

Correct.

Hey, they're right.

They're to T and and whether we use them this year, say we use them this year, but I feel like it should be should be noted that this is hey, this could be a one time.

All right, I think that's that's doable at least to identify them.

If if if.

Yeah, sure.

We'll you know, we'll send out all of the Community Center fund expenses by kind of broader line item.

So you'll see what's debt service, what's operations of of the convention center and then what are our, you know, what we call our visitor serving in cultural facilities of which many of those things that we shift the Crocker and those other things would be included there.

And we'll have them line item by amount.

And the reason I say this is that I think it might help the discussion because what I heard from the city treasure and when when they presented was, I can't give you an estimate of what we could or could not use for economic development, you know, because I don't know what there is there for us for the city

or the city Treasurer's office to work with it.

So I think that's that needs to that needs to be identified in a way that the council can discuss and debate that and then make the appropriate decision.

And to go ahead to piggyback off of Mayor pretend garras comments is like, we're not saying no to these things.

We're saying we want to do a plan of action.

And it's two years, one year, two years, five years, 10 years.

And I said this back in November last year when we did the waterfront monies and and I was like, I just want to make sure that we're being strategic and like doing a full analysis of how we're going to invest our dollars that we get put in a dollar and we get $3 back and incorporate equity.

So in terms of staff, what kind of timeline are we looking at to be able to bring us a rough draft of what a plan to look like.

Yeah, like the two, five, 10 year strategic plan that I've been asking for.

So that's something that I need to we've had staff out.

I think we asked for it just a couple weeks ago.

So that is something that we'll put together a timeline on see Megan nodding.

So we'll get that back to you.

I have an answer today.

And are these I'm just looking at the pie chart that Megan presented.

Are these divided between city expenses and cultural partners or are they in one category the other?

Which part I'm sorry.

We've got the 287s and then we got whatever else there was that was considered ongoing.

They are in every they're not in the city expenses.

They are either in the G1C possessory interest tax, the visit sack and the cultural partners.

So they're in all those three categories.

Oh, oh.

So we will help outline it, outline it more discreetly.

Okay.

Presentations during budget.

Okay.

And that does that does remind me that there's a cost of the city for possessory interest tax for golden one.

And it's not clear to me why that is.

I have to think through the deal.

Who owns who owns who owns golden one.

But we put it into our obligation is to put the value of the PIT into the debt service and that was being carried by the general fund.

And this was the shift to the to T.

So this actually is a it is a separate tax equivalent that the city were private entity it would pay.

But instead it's putting it into debt service.

Correct.

It gets paid to us, but it's part of the G1C deal.

Put it into the debt service of the 258 and the Treasury office is nodding to.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you for the explanation.

Okay.

Anything else on this item?

Only thing other thing was that, you know, in order to get more to you, we have to build more hotels.

That's it.

Yes.

That would that would help to women.

All right.

This is just a comment item.

So there's no action required.

And we have a comments or questions items from members of the committee.

And then we have speakers off agenda.

I have two speakers on this agenda item.

Oh, on this agenda item.

I'm sorry.

Item number seven, I have Lambert and Mac worthy.

Okay.

And then I also have two speakers for matters not on the agenda.

Okay.

I was glad to hear chairman ask and I really didn't hear an answer, but I was glad to hear you ask who owns Golden one.

Because that's, that's something that I'd like to get to, but not today.

I'd also like to pay respect to Megan of creative arts because she's been very active in Del Paso Heights regarding the grant drumline.

They're going to Ireland this year.

There should be plenty of money out of TOT or wherever it's going to come from to cover their travel lodging and food.

And of course, their parents and whoever's going to be coming chaperones.

They have never, they've always brought back great reviews when they travel because they always ask them, where are you from?

They say Sacramento.

So you can't put a dollar value on that.

Also, and I hope the chairman and some of the people on the roster and other people are excited about this to the band back cheesecakes will be featured at the this weekend, the 27th, the Sacramento and Northeast California black

My job is to make sure that cheesecake is a hit logistically and make sure it's delivered on time.

So shout out to the millennials and shout out to the Davis family for pulling that off because it's the bridal and wedding expo.

Mac worthy on item seven.

Roger, you got your work cut out for you.

I hope that we get some people on the oath to explain what is part cultural partners.

We find out who was stealing and who was just put it in the pocket.

We, we need to really get on top of this because to t tax that went into something else.

And Roger, this type of thing, you should with the garbage that we have in the paper within the management,

you shouldn't even refer to that person for nothing.

You'll get caught in the squeeze.

If we get to court, you're going to get caught in the squeeze because that's the person that's subject to go to jail.

So these are the things when we look at the tax problem system within the administration now and the agency and the attorney can't speak when she should be speaking.

I'd like to get the whole, the complete attorneys on the oath here to say you didn't know why the hell didn't you go outside and get a glass.

You can't get glass when there's a boy here.

This boy here don't know nothing. He's just there. These are the things, Roger.

I'm going to state what you're going to know if I do or I die, but I'm going to state what you tell me.

See this thing turn around and it's going to have to turn around from up there.

Not now here, up there.

We got to clean up the corruption.

If you don't clean up the corruption, we'll never get it turned around.

And it's going to be sad.

It's going to be down the road.

Here's a guy talking about Trump when he should be talking about the corruption here.

Trump doing the right thing.

Pull that money off as he's doing the colleges until you straighten up your bullshit on the campus or any administration and let's go for.

So we now turn to matters not on the agenda.

Mr. Worthy, would you like to speak on matters not on the agenda and following Mr. Worthy as Lambert?

Yeah, we are.

When the Oakland A's made a decision to come here, who done that negotiation?

Who done that negotiation?

People, you got to quit lying.

There's a stadium being built in Las Vegas with the Oakland A's.

Why didn't you tell the people that?

Why did you get a room here?

Why didn't you say that?

Not because of the ignorance.

That's only a different word.

I question why would a pro team come and be in a Statenlock team stadium and not be alone.

Now I get it from Las Vegas.

I call places and I talk to people.

It's a stadium under construction for the Oakland A's in Las Vegas.

So your TLT tax, you won't get those people coming here visiting because the Oakland A's is going to be gone.

And that is a contract somewhere in the city how long it was intended to be here.

Be transparent.

You don't have to keep lying.

You can be transparent with the people.

You are paying people to vote for you with the neighborhood association.

That's what's going on here.

Thank you for your comment.

Lambert is our final speaker for matters not on the agenda.

I'm going to end this on a positive note.

First of all, I want to say to the city clerk's office, thank you for keeping me in the loop regarding this city manager.

I call it a tour, a town hall meeting.

It's going to be in Del Paso Heights tomorrow.

Those people who are counting on outside the country, that's a gamble that you've made many years and you're going to suffer because of that dependency.

I hope it works out for you because I'm for the small business person and the underdog.

That's why Grand High School wins a lot of state championships.

We are known for operating under pressure with everything on the line.

Shout out to the Better Business Bureau, Sacramento and Northeast California.

If you don't know Northeast California, it's a lot of business through going towards Reno.

And they've endorsed us.

Not because they don't like me or whatever.

They've endorsed the product.

So look forward to hearing from you, Mr. Dickerson.

We guarantee you we'll be there tomorrow.

Thank you for your comments, Chair.

I have no more speakers.

Thank you.

That completes the committee's business and we stand adjourned.